Detective psychic Dorothy Allison dies before 75 - as predicted

At age 14, she said she had a vision of her father's death. A few weeks later he died of pneumonia.

Dorothy Allison suddenly came to the conclusion that she was a psychic. Her mother, a seer, warned that her visions were a gift and should never be used for profit.

So for more than 30 years, Allison used that gift to help police find missing children and those who prey upon them. She amassed a wall full of framed citations from police departments, but never accepted money, save for the occasional travel expenses or fee for appearing on a TV show to discuss psychic detective work.

Nine years ago, Allison told her family she would not live to be 75.

She died Wednesday in a Belleville, N.J., hospital of heart failure at the age of 74. Her birthday was four weeks away.

In her career as a detective psychic, Allison worked on more than 5,000 cases for law enforcement agencies around the globe and was credited with helping to solve more than a dozen murders and find at least 50 missing children.

Considered the dean of the detective psychics, Allison wrote a book about her work in 1979 titled "A Psychic's Story."

The housewife and mother of four from Nutley, N.J., first volunteered her services in 1967 when she told the Nutley police she had dreamed of a blond, blue-eyed boy in a green snowsuit with his shoes on the wrong feet, drowned in a pond and his body stuck in a drainpipe. A month later a missing boy, whose description had not been publicized, was found in a drainpipe, and his shoes were on the wrong feet.

In 1974, San Francisco's Randolph Hearst invited her to help find his kidnapped daughter, Patricia Hearst. Allison didn't find the young woman but later called the FBI twice to say she felt Patty was hiding in Pennsylvania and then in New York City. Both "feelings" proved accurate, and Allison also predicted the newspaper heiress would join her captors in robbing a bank.

Two years after that, Allison saw the word "MAR" and oil in connection to a missing 14-year-old girl. In 1978, two boys found the girl's body in an oil drum on New York City's Staten Island near a rock with the word "MAR" scrawled on it.

Before David Berkowitz's arrest, Allison also was credited with giving an accurate description of the "Son of Sam" killer to a police artist and correctly predicting that he would be picked up on a traffic violation.

The diminutive Allison, who could hurl epithets at critics and child abusers alike, wore a medallion of St. Anthony, protector of the lost, and slept with color snapshots of her "little angels," the missing children in her cases. The medallion and the photos, she claimed, helped her visualize locations of bodies and suspects.

Allison is survived by her husband, Bob; two sons, Robert and Alex; a daughter, Dorothy, and seven grandchildren.